A Summer Storm’s Disruption Is Felt in the Technology Cloud

The New York Times: Over the weekend, a number of companies learned the hard way about the havoc storms can cause to clouds. On Friday night, lightning caused a power outage at Amazon’s Virginia data center, and for undetermined reasons, the backup power generator also failed. As a result, many Web companies that use Amazon’s cloud computing services, including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram, were knocked offline. Amazon restored service for most customers by Saturday afternoon.

Also over the weekend, difficulties dealing with the leap second knocked many websites offline. At midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Saturday, timekeepers an extra second to the world’s atomic clocks, but Linux and Java weren’t prepared to deal with the change. Notable sites that experienced downtime as a result of the bug included Reddit, Mozilla and Gawker.